When you scan a document that has text or numeric data on it, you are able to read and understand what is written in the scanned image. However, to a computer, the resulting image file is just as meaningless an assortment of pixels as a landscape photo. In order to transform this information into an editable format that you can search through, copy, and modify without retyping it manually, you will need the an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.

There is a wide variety of OCR software available. While they all share the ability to convert images of machine printed (not handwritten) text or numbers into an editable format, the various software often have different features, accuracy, prices, and language options.

Arabic OCR, which is the ability to convert some combination of Arabic scripts and Hebrew to editable formats, is a relatively new option that many OCR software still do not support it out of the box. ReadIRIS was the first major OCR application to offer support for Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi optical character recognition on the PC platform. More recently, ABBYY FineReader has introduced an option for Hebrew and Arabic OCR in version 11.